I have never been so relieved to see a row of terraced houses in my life. After six hours of driving from the Eurotunnel, including one spectacular wrong turn that took us through what I can only describe as "aggressive countryside," we finally rolled into Sint Annaland. The satnav had given up on us somewhere near Middelburg, and my partner had developed that particular silent fury that comes from being passenger-seat navigator to someone who insists they know better. I did not know better. We established this beyond doubt when I confidently steered us down a farm track and into a staring contest with a very judgmental herd of Zeeland cattle.

The holiday home itself, when we found it, was one of those tidy brick numbers with proper curtains and a front door that opened without a fight. I will be honest: my first priority was not the decor. My first priority was the kitchen, because I had been fantasising about a proper cup of tea since Calais, and the service station offerings had been criminal. The kitchen, mercifully, was spotless and sensibly arranged, with an actual oven that looked like it had seen genuine use rather than the decorative appliances you sometimes find in rental properties. There was a proper hob, a fridge-freezer with actual freezer space, and enough pots and pans that I would not have to cook everything in a single saucepan like some sort of camping tragedy.

We had arrived on a Friday, which in my limited experience of Dutch life meant one critical thing: market day. The following morning I marched down to the Sint Annaland harbour market with the determination of someone who had been living on motorway crisps. The market was not enormous, but it was serious. There were stalls of mussels still dripping with North Sea water, crates of tomatoes that actually smelled like tomatoes, and a fishmonger who sold me kibbeling with such generous portions of tartare sauce that I nearly wept. I ate it standing up, leaning against a bollard, while my partner made sensible purchases of vegetables and bread. I have no regrets. The bread, incidentally, came from a baker who clearly understood that a loaf should have structural integrity and a proper crust, not that cotton wool nonsense that passes for bread in some places.

That evening I attempted my first self-catering triumph: Zeeland mussels cooked in the traditional style, or at least what I understood the traditional style to be after some hasty phone research in the supermarket. The Jumbo in Sint Annaland is not a large shop, but it is a precise shop, and I wandered the aisles with the particular anxiety of someone trying to identify unfamiliar herbs. I found the celery. I found the onions. I found a bottle of white wine that was not, strictly speaking, cooking wine, but I maintain this improved the dish. The mussels themselves I had rinsed with perhaps excessive thoroughness, having read somewhere about sand being the enemy of enjoyment. My partner watched me scrubbing mussels in the sink with the intensity of a surgeon and made no comment, which I understood to be loving support.

The cooking itself went better than expected, though I will confess to a moment of panic when the mussels began opening and I became convinced I had poisoned us both. They had not been poisoned. They were magnificent, plump and sweet, and we ate them with the bread from the morning market, using the empty shells as improvised tongs because I had forgotten to buy proper mussel equipment. There is something deeply satisfying about eating with your hands at a proper table, wine glasses leaving rings on the wood, a bowl of discarded shells growing steadily more impressive.

The remainder of our stay developed into a comfortable rhythm of market mornings and cooking experiments. I attempted a fish stew that was arguably too ambitious, featuring a local fish I could not properly identify and a quantity of paprika I later recognised as excessive. We ate it anyway, because holiday rules apply, and because the view from the kitchen window of Sint Annaland's quiet streets made even mediocre stew seem like an event. I perfected my kibbeling consumption technique, which mostly involved buying it earlier in the day before the queue formed. I discovered that the local cheese shop, a small affair near the harbour, sold a aged Gouda that made my usual supermarket purchases taste like candle wax in comparison.

By the end of the week I had accumulated a small collection of local ingredients with ambitious plans: a jar of Zeeland mustard, a packet of speculaas spices, some dried seaweed that I kept meaning to use creatively and never did. The kitchen, which had initially been merely functional, had become genuinely pleasant, marked with the small disasters and successes of actual use. There was a stain on the hob I could not remove, which I choose to believe adds character. There was the afternoon I attempted poffertjes without a proper pan, producing something that was more "small misshapen pancakes" than the traditional fluffy spheres, but which we ate with butter and icing sugar regardless.

On our final morning I made a last market trip, buying bread and cheese for the journey home, plus a final portion of kibbeling that I ate at the same bollard as my first. The harbour was quiet, the market traders packing away, and I felt that particular holiday melancholy of knowing you have eaten better than you will eat for some time. We packed the car with our accumulated possessions, including the unused seaweed and the half-empty mustard, and I took one last look at the little kitchen where I had been so thoroughly, messily, satisfactorily domestic. The satnav, I noted, was already suggesting routes. I did not trust it for a moment.